The present invention relates to a daisy-wheel printer including a daisy print wheel (having types at the external circumferential edges of individual spokes making up a daisy wheel) provided its carriage. The printer of the present invention sequentially performs a printing operation by controlling the movement of the carriage in the direction of the printing row and by the rotation of the designated type element of the print wheel to the printing position. Such a daisy-wheel type printer is well known by the prior art, for example as disclosed by the Japanese Patent Publication No. 8388 of 1981 and the Japanese Patent Laid-Open Document No. 25931 of 1976, and actually, is already been widely used.
The daisy-wheel type print is provided with the printer wheel 1 as shown in FIG. 1. It has a plurality of spokes 2,2 . . . , each having the identical shape and externally extending from the center hub 3. Each spoke 2 is provided with a type element 4 at the external circumferential position. Type elements normally include capital and small alphabetical characters, numerals, and symbols. As shown in FIG. 2, the printer wheel 1 is coupled to the shaft of the drive motor 5 mounted on the carriage so that it can be rotated by the drive motor 5. The drive motor 5 controls the rotation of the print wheel 1 so that the designated type element 4 can be correctly set to the printing position against the platen by operating the hammer 7. When the hammer 7 strikes the back of the type element 4 at the printing position against the platen 6, the type element 4 prints the designated character or symbol onto the print paper 8 set in front of the platen 6 using the ink ribbon 9. Using such a printer, by changing the available printer wheel 1, between italic or Gothic character for example, any type of printing can be optionally achieved.
Now, a wide variety of functions are required for printers. For example, there is a need for printing a simplified diagram, a picture, or a graph together with sentences. It means that there is a strong demand for realizing such a multifunctional printer capable of printing either a picture, a diagram, or a graph together with sentences. Nevertheless, actually, none of the conventional daisy-wheel type printer has ever realized the printing of such a diagram or graph, although the printing by using a variety of character styles can be done very easily.